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Some of those who finally made it home felt like Odysseus. One man hiked 15 miles from Wall Street to the East Bronx. Another had his wife sail their Chris-Craft 30 miles down the Hudson to pick him up at the 79th Street marina. A dozen passengers crossed the East River to Queens in the back of an armored car; aboard a flatbed truck, threescore executives toting attache cases jounced happily home across the 59th Street bridge.
A Dream? The streets were full of happy drunks, but even those who had not touched a drop seemed high—gripped by a crisis-born spirit of camaraderie and exhilaration. In Brooklyn, a meat market donated a whole pig to a neighboring convent, thus providing everybody for blocks around with a snack of roast pork. Manhattan's Four Seasons Restaurant, where prices are rarely mentioned because so few would believe them, dispensed soup free of charge; at "21," where the only drink on the house is water, they passed out steak sandwiches and free libations without limit.
Exhilaration is a fleeting state. After hours of darkness, New Yorkers began to wonder of their city, as Othello did of doomed Desdemona,
. . . where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume?
Ever so slowly, Con Edison found enough of it to relume sections of the city. At 5:28 a.m., precisely twelve hours after everything went black, a large section of midtown Manhattan blazed anew with light—causing those whose electric clocks were right on time to wonder the following morning whether it had all been only a dream.
It had not—as the run on shirts, socks and underwear, the appearance of thousands of haggard employees and the empty spaces at 30% of the desks and workbenches throughout the city amply proved. With few exceptions, New Yorkers the morning after could fully appreciate the sign that appeared in the window of a littered midtown Automat: PARDON OUR APPEARANCE.
WE WERE UP ALL NIGHT.
Calm in the Tank. Deep inside the Pentagon, in the National Military Command Center—called "the tank"—first reports of the power failure flashed in from Strategic Air Command headquarters at Omaha and the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) at Colorado Springs. Both reported that eight major military bases in the Northeastern U.S. had suddenly —and inexplicably—shifted to auxiliary power but that "the trouble was confined to a particular area and not due to bombs or such."
Communications with SAC and NORAD headquarters were checked and found intact. NORAD reported nothing alien or unfriendly in the skies over the U.S. "The Pentagon," said a senior officer, "remained calm, although pulses quickened."
On the other side of the Potomac, at Civil Defense headquarters, an official first heard about the blackout from a home-bound employee. When it did swing into action, the unwieldy agency determined that its 97